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THROUGH DARKNESS 
TO DAWN 




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THROUGH DARKNESS 
TO DAWN 



BY 

WILLIAM NORTH RICE, PH.D.,LL.D. 

Professor of Geology, Wesleyan University 



WITH A FOREWORD BY 

WOODROW WILSON 

President of the United States 



NEW YORK 

FRANK D. BEATTYS & CO. 

1917 






Copyright, 1917, by 
Frank D. Beattys & Co. 



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TO THE BOYS OF WESLEYAN 
YOUNG AND OLD 



THE WHITE HOUSE 

WASHINGTON 



3 M'y> ^9^7 

I want to give myself the pleasure of 
prefacing this modest but very significant little 
book with an expression of my affectionate admira- 
tion for an old friend, Professor Rice, its author. 
The fine spirit of the man everyone who reads it 
will feel and will take refreshment and stimula- 
tion from. It speaks in authentic tones the charac- 
ter of the man I learned to admire in years now too 
long gone by when I had the privilege of being his 
colleague; and I have written this in order that I 
may have an opportunity to avow publicly a very 
earnestly cherished friendship. 




THROUGH DARKNESS 
TO DAWN 



NOTE 

/f Patriotic Rally of students and 
y^^yji cilumni of Wesleyan University 
was held in Memorial Chapel, on Sat- 
urday, June 16th, 1917, as a part of 
the exercises of Commencement Week, 
One of the addresses delivered on that 
occasion is offered to a larger audience 
in this little volume. 



THROUGH DARKNESS 
TO DAWN 




AR is bad, and the great- 
est war is the worst war. 
One mangled corpse, one 
woman sitting in dumb despair, 
one child di^opping its playthings 
to cry for the father who will never 
return, is a tragedy. When that 
tragedy is multiplied by milhons, 
its horror is unspeakable. Tens of 
millions of men in arms, millions 
killed or wounded or languishing in 
prison camps, battle lines hundreds 
of miles in length, tens of thousands 
of square miles of rich farms with 



Through Darkness to Dawn 

smiling villages and prosperous towns 
converted into desert — ^these things 
make a picture of horror such as the 
world has never seen before. And to 
the agony of the present is added 
foreboding for the future. How will 
the industries of peace rally beneath 
the burden of billions of debt ? What 
will become of the family, the foun- 
dation of civilization, when the po- 
tential husbands and fathers are 
slain? 

For two years and a half we looked 
at these scenes of woe beyond the 
Atlantic with compassion, and sent 
some gifts to bring a little relief ; but 
we were neutral. We rejoiced in the 
geographical isolation which seemed 
to justify us in enjoying the blessings 

1:43 



An Address 



of peace. In the preliminary stages 
of the war, we were not greatly inter- 
ested in the rights or wrongs of Ser- 
bia. If the Kaiser wanted to fight the 
Czar, we were a little regretful that 
both could not be beaten. When 
France and heroic little Belgium rose 
to repel the invader from their land, 
they had our cordial sympathy. 
When England sadly and sternly 
took up arms in defense of a violated 
treaty, we heartily applauded. But 
as neutrals we felt bound to be just 
to both sides. We said, what was 
true, that the guilt of this war be- 
longed not alone to the men of this 
generation, that the war was largely 
due to evil traditions in European 
international relations which had 
1:53 



Through Darkness to Dawn 

come down from a former age, and 
that for the shaping of those evil tra- 
ditions no one nation alone was re- 
sponsible. 

But, as time passed on, it became 
more and more obvious that, though 
no nation was free from blame for the 
evil heritage from the past, there was 
yet relatively a right and a wrong 
side in the present war. The poly- 
chrome literature in which the various 
nations told their story left no doubt. 
The German "White Book" was 
black with damnation, alike in what 
it contained and in what was sup- 
pressed. The World War is a Ger- 
man war, or rather a Hohenzollern 
war. Its motive was military ambi- 
tion. It began with the shameless 



An Address 



violation of a solemn treaty. It has 
been prosecuted from the beginning 
with a brutal disregard of the rights 
of non-combatants and neutrals, 
which the world has never seen since 
the Dark Ages. The atrocities in 
Belgium have not been sporadic 
crimes of individuals but an organ- 
ized poHcy of crime. If anything was 
needed for the condemnation of Ger- 
many, it was furnished by the idiotic 
logic of her philosophers and scien- 
tists and the barbarous ethics of her 
theologians and pastors who ventured 
to write in her behalf. There is no 
escape from the conclusion that the 
Hohenzollern dynasty has become 
the enemy of the human race. 

And still we remained neutral. 



Through Darkness to Dawn 

Rightly, I believe, our government 
declined to accept the role of a knight 
errant. But at last the supreme crime 
of the submarine warfare forced into 
the war the most pacific of all nations. 
We could not keep out of the war any- 
longer without the absolute surrender 
of the rights of our citizens. And, 
now that we are in the war, our aims 
are larger than the occasion which 
brought us into it. We were com- 
pelled to declare war in defense of 
our own rights, but in entering the 
war we became the defenders of the 
rights of mankind. In our first war 
for liberty, we fought for the freedom 
of the little colonies on the Atlantic 
coast which were destined to become a 
great nation. In our second war for 



An Address 



liberty we fought for the freedom of 
an enslaved race and for the preser- 
vation of national unity. In our 
third and greatest war for liberty we 
are fighting for the freedom of man- 
kind. 

The thoughts of our allies, like our 
own, have widened as the war has de- 
veloped. France and Belgium en- 
tered the war in self-defense; Eng- 
land, to maintain the neutrahty of 
Belgium; Italy, to redeem "Itaha Ir- 
redenta"; but we are all fighting now 
for world freedom, for the supremacy 
of democracy throughout the world. 
The new Russia, who has dethroned 
her czar and called back her exiles 
from Siberia, is striving to be worthy 
of the great fellowship of the cham- 

1^1 



Through Darkness to Dawn 

pions of human freedom. Poor Rus- 
sia, indeed, coming suddenly out of 
the dungeon gloom in which she has 
lain for centuries into the Ught of 
freedom, gropes and stumbles a lit- 
tle, dazed by the unaccustomed 
brightness; but soon, we trust, her 
eyes will become accustomed to the 
light, and her steps will grow firm 
and steady. It is well that among the 
counselors whom we have sent to her 
is our greatest master of the prin- 
ciples of constitutional democracy. 

We must, as President Wilson has 
said, "make the world safe for de- 
mocracy." The world will soon be 
safe for nothing else. The day of the 
kings is ending: the day of the peo- 

CIO] 



'An Address 



pies is dawning. The Czar has gone : 
the Kaisers must go. The only mon- 
archs that the new age can tolerate 
are those whose crowns are only sym- 
bols of national unity and whose de- 
crees but register a nation's will. 

How long before the dawn? That 
depends on the German people. The 
mental attitude of the German nation 
is a fearful illustration of the power 
of universal education conducted un- 
der bureaucratic control to pervert 
human intelligence. Yet there are 
not wanting symptoms that the Ger- 
man people may recover from the 
delusion in which they have been edu- 
cated and may learn the truth that 
will make them free. The new col- 



Through Darkness to Dawn 

portage of the allied aviators, who are 
dropping from the skies President 
Wilson's address to Congress, may- 
help to spread the new gospel. The 
lofty principles of national morality, 
so nobly expressed in the words of 
our President, may well prove a high 
explosive beneath the Hohenzollern 
throne. The English artillery, which 
is smashing to flinders the steel and 
concrete foundations of the Hinden- 
burg line, may awaken in the mind of 
the German people a suspicion that 
their "Gott mit Uns," their tutelary 
Thor, is thundering on the other side. 
It is our hope and prayer that they 
may recover from their madness be- 
fore they are reduced to starvation. 
Our foe is not the German people. 

1:123 



An Address 



We chant no "hymn of hate." We 
love the land of Luther and Kant and 
Goethe and Hehnholtz. To us who 
studied in Germany and who are 
grateful for the privileges which we 
enjoyed and for the friendships 
which we formed, one of the saddest 
experiences of the war has been to see 
the splendid educational, commercial, 
and industrial life of that country 
crushed beneath the Juggernaut car 
of war. We are fighting for the free- 
dom of Germany. In the words of 
that great peace-lover and peace- 
maker, ex-President Taft, "We are 
in this war to stay ; we are in this war 
to win ; we are in this war to wipe the 
Hohenzollern philosophy from off 
D33 



Through Darkness to Dawn 

the face of the whole wide earth, for- 
ever and forever."* 

We are fighting for world freedom. 
No less are we fighting for world 
peace. A democratic Europe will be 
a peaceful Europe. A century ago 
the nations banished to St. Helena a 
war lord who, in the arrogance of his 
power, had defied God and man. 
And then they reconstructed the map 
of Europe. The men who made the 
new map believed in the divine right 
of kings. When the war lord of to- 
day is sent to some peaceful seclusion, 
the men who will reconstruct the map 
of Europe will be men who believe in 

* "One of the prerequisite conditions of peace is the 
democratization of every country." Count Michael 
Karolyi, in the Hungarian House of Deputies, as re- 
ported in telegram from Budapest to Amsterdam, pub- 
lished in American papers July 14th. 

D43 



An Address 



the divine right of peoples. In that 
new reconstruction the problem will 
be to recognize and, so far as possible, 
to fulfill the aspirations of nations 
and races. Never again will terri- 
tories be bartered between the mon- 
archs as if their populations were 
only herds of cattle to be bought and 
sold. The arbitrary partition of ter- 
ritory a century ago left bitter in- 
heritances of hate. The peace of 
Europe has been only an armed 
truce, and the armaments growing 
year by year have been a growing 
menace. Balanced alhances have 
kept the peace of Europe in unstable 
equilibrium, ready at any moment to 
totter into war. The end of this war 
will not be a "Holy AUiance" of 

[153 



Through Darkness to Dawn 

despots, but a league of peace among 
nations that respect each other's 
rights. 

At the beginning of this war, 
Lieutenant- General Miles declared 
that it would be the greatest war 
in history and the last great war. 
Strangely prophetic, in these days of 
Zeppelins and aeroplanes, seem those 
lines of Tennyson: 

"For I dipt into the future, far as 
human eye could see. 
Saw the Vision of the world, and 
all the wonder that would be ; 

Heard the heavens fill with shout- 
ing, and there rained a ghastly 
dew 

From the nations' airy navies 
grappling in the central blue; 
• t t • t • 



An Address 



Till the war-drum throbb'd no 
longer, and the battle-flags were 
furl'd, 

In the Parliament of man, the 
Federation of the world." 

In the vision of the Seer of Patmos 
the slaughter of Armageddon ushers 
in the new heaven and the new earth. 

What this war will cost us, how 
much of our material wealth will burn 
to ashes, how many of our homes will 
be shrouded in mourning, how many 
of the dear boys of Wesleyan who 
are or soon will be in France will 
never return, God knows. But with 
solemn joy we accept our share, 
whatever that share may be, in the 
great agony which will work the so- 
cial and political redemption of man- 
kind. 



